Abstract 

The term “wartime collaboration” – working for an occupying or hostile state in a manner that constitutes treason of one’s own community – first emerged during World War II and has been a constant feature of conflict since. While political betrayal was common throughout history, the emergence of the term opened a new discursive field in which allegations of collaboration have become prevalent and highly contested. This emergence also normalized the punishment of collaborators by armed groups and vigilantes, or by post-conflict polities. Collaborators have been exiled, imprisoned, beaten and executed. Yet variations nonetheless exist in who is considered a collaborator and how they are punished. In this paper I ask: what explains the emergence and variation in how collaboration is understood and adjudicated? I claim that the discourse on collaboration emerges as a response to counterinsurgency strategies and changes with it. Counterinsurgency – an approach to the “pacification” of an occupied society – hinges on controlling the local population and shaping an “ideal” counterinsurgent subject, a subject who collaborates. Allegations of collaboration – rendering those who collaborate as enemies of society – and a respective punitive regime thus emerge as a way for the occupied to resist the effects of counterinsurgent strategies of the occupier, attempting to form a resisting, disobedient subject instead. To substantiate this claim, I look to the shifting discourse on collaboration as it appeared in Irish Republican newspapers and analyze it vis-à-vis trends in British counterinsurgency during the Troubles (1968-1998).